


No Hiding Place

by MacBeth



Series: Multi-fandom meme [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Poetry prompt, change is the only constant, fresh faces, multi-fandom meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacBeth/pseuds/MacBeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah's still getting used to the changes in the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Hiding Place

In the crowded, noisy marketplace, cram-jammed with members of a hundred different alien species, all deeply and loudly involved in buying and selling and trading and swapping and arguing and wheeling and dealing, and probably cheating and defrauding and double-crossing, Sarah Jane was astonished to see two other humans besides herself. One was a woman in a spotless white silk robe, who sat under an awning and listened with regal impassivity to the spiels of an entire legion of salescreatures. The other was a shabby young man with a foxy nose and a foxy expression, who sat beside the road playing on a strange widget that Sarah assumed was intended to be a musical instrument, although she couldn’t hear any sounds at all coming from the weird shiny multicoloured metal blob.

But the Doctor had stopped in his tracks, so suddenly that Sarah had bumped into his back and almost stepped on the trailing end of his scarf. He had cocked his head and closed his eyes, swaying as if listening in rapture, and remained that way for quite five minutes. At last, the young man stopped blowing into his blob and poking fingers into odd crannies in the changing surface, and the Doctor opened his eyes very wide, beamed incandescently, dug into a pocket and dropped a handful of metallic and ceramic odds and ends into the bowl at the man’s side. Sarah hoped that some of the handful at least was currency and not spare bits of plumbing.

As they turned to go, she noticed the sign next to the busker’s tip bowl, written in several different scripts. The English line read ‘Afraid Of change? Leave your’s Here!!’

Back in the TARDIS, Sarah tried not to be obvious as she studied the Doctor’s face. He was leaning over the control console, adjusting something, and the blue flickers cast his beaky profile into sharp outline. His expression didn’t change, but she knew he had noticed.

“Anything new and different, Sarah?”

She shrugged. “Mmm, no, not exactly. Except you, of course.”

He turned to look at her, smiling, and if the smile was different, the flutter it caused inside her was the same. “Not too different, I hope.” He patted the console. “And the TARDIS here is the same . . . ” One blue flicker turned red, popped and went out, and he scowled at it.

“Is it hard?”

“What?”

“Changing like that.”

“Everything changes.” The Doctor opened a side panel on the console and peered inside. “Change is the only constant.”

“Yes, but to change so much – all at once, bam, your old clothes don’t fit, your hair’s all different, even your face . . . especially your face . . . ”

“You’re thinking like a human.” The voice was muffled; the Doctor was already on his back, half inside the console, tinkering. Even doing something so familiar, even with the voice distorted, even if she closed her eyes and thought about listening to the Doctor as she’d first known him, she still couldn’t hear the old voice anywhere in the new.

She tried another tack. “So if the regeneration thing’s a Time Lord thing, do all Time Lords regenerate like you do?”

“Mmmm. Well, not exactly yes, but no – they mostly do it rather differently . . . ” His visible hand groped for a tool just out of reach, and Sarah picked it up and handed it to him. “I’ve done it a bit more often, you see, and I’m rather better at it if I do say so myself.”

“When the other Time Lords regenerate, do they change completely too?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all.” The Doctor sat up, ducking his head in time to keep from banging it on the inside of the panel opening. “Time Lords hate it when anything changes. Especially themselves. It’s what makes them so terribly dull, don’t you see?”

Oddly enough, Sarah thought that she did see. “So changing all over like that . . . it’s something you don’t mind?”

“Oh, not too much. You get used to it, after a few centuries.” He looked thoughtful. “I _have_ been doing it for a while now.”

“At least the Daleks and Cybermen and Sontarans and everybody won’t be able to recognise you, if you run into them again some day.” She tried to sound cheerful.

“Oh, but they can.” The Doctor opened his eyes very wide again. “They can.” His broad smile slowly made its way across his face, until everything from the collar up was beaming. “No fear.”

All that murderous hate, all that potential destruction, and it knew his name and his face and his soul, knew him and hated him individually out of all the myriad blinks of life in Time and Space. The Doctor looked as if the whole idea was a massive treat, as if he’d like nothing better than coming to grips with the most deadly forces in the universe – psychotic, xenophobic monsters, soulless mechanical killers, endless armies of cloned soldiers laying the galaxy waste behind them.

Well, odds were that he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a multi-fandom meme, to a random poetry prompt:  
>  _It’s little the good to hide my head_ (Dorothy Parker)


End file.
